Counting the Invisible Costs

What happens in Christian University Culture Wars?

Last week I wrote about Shirley Mullen’s new book Claiming the Courageous Middle. It’s a great book, especially for those in Christian higher education. She served as history faculty member at two insitutions, provost at Westmont, and then president of Houghton.

I reached out to Shirley as soon as I was reading the book and again when I finished. We have some similarity in our career paths, although I never served as a president (nobody asked!). We know some of the same people. In our email exchanges, we agreed that meeting by Zoom would be fun. We had that call on Wednesday.

We talked about our respective journeys through Christian Higher Education, why we thought it was valuable as a unique segment of the university landscape, and the themes that crossed our two books.

In discussing the tensions between Culture Wars and the views of students and alumni, I shared an observation I had from one of my institutions in the early 2000s. It seemed that the people most likely to attend Homecoming had graduated in the 1970s. The donor class was even older than that. I wondered if that pattern of a “lost generation” was common across institutions.

Shirley shared that they had a hard time getting alumni children to attend Houghton. The parents appreciated their time at the institution but felt that there kids could go to the Big School and get involved with InterVarsity or some Christian Studies center.

I shared a similar story from my book about my first institution. An MBA student did a small survey of alumni and similarly found that parents wanted their kid to go the Big School. They did say that there was a kid in the church youth group who had a drug history and a hard family life who would really benefit from attending the Christian university. I also commented on anecdotes I’d heard over the years of younger affluent alums who said that they’d never give any money to their alma mater as long as this policy was in place or that administrator still ran chapel.

I made me wonder how much of the financial strains and enrollment challenges of Christian Higher Education are a function of these populations opting out of support, recruiting, or advocacy. The university may feel like there’s benefit to boundary maintenance and shifting rightward to avoid the appearance to dissent. But for each step taken in this direction, unknown numbers of alums, friends, and family drop away.

On the heels of these thoughts, Religion New Service broke the story Wednesday night about Grace College in Indiana not renewing the contract of a professor, Matt Warner, because of positions he held before joining the faculty.

Matt Warner’s Grace College photo

He became the focus of an online campaign to get his position, This online petition was initiated by an alum who had served as an ambassador for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. It fits the kind of academic “gotcha” that TPUSA and other groups pride themselves in.

Technically, Warner was on a one-year contract and even that was iffy because the board refused to endorse his hiring during their fall meeting and was considering never doing so. While non-renewal is technically different from firing, it’s a distinction without a difference, especially to students and colleagues who had invested in the Warners over the year.

The RNS story draws parallels to other faculty members who have faced similar ouster for similar reasons. In sharing the story on social media, I wrote the following:

Every time something like this happens at a Christian university, some students opt not to return to school, others decide that they can’t recommend the school to their friends, and faculty start studying Chronicle job listings.

A friend retiring this spring shared that faculty retirement was another response when the school takes draconian steps. I replied that because too many institutions maintain an individual focus, they see the student transfer or the faculty member’s new job, or the early retirement as a matter of individual choice and never stop to consider the larger structural or cultural dynamics that might be in play that need desperate attention.

All of this brought me back to the conversation with Shirley about invisible costs of these actions. How many students were lost? How many faculty decided to simply go with the flow and not bring their best to class? How many parents decided that if this was how the university operated, then they’d recommend their kids go elsewhere.

If Christian Higher Education is to have the impact it hopes for going forward, these issues need attention. They aren’t solved at the institutional level. Each one is seen as idiosyncratic (even if reporters like Kathryn Post remind us of where else it has happened).

I’m trying to think of what it means to address these questions at a systemic level. In her SubStack yesterday, Kristin DuMez suggested that the CCCU could potentially play a role here.

The CCCU has spent a lot of time and energy lobbying for religious liberty protections at the national level. Maybe it’s time they turn their attention in another direction, every bit as much a threat to their missions as institutions of Christian higher education.

I’d love to see it, but I’m not hopeful. The CCCU has been too imbedded with Culture War organizations for a long time. And like the institutions they represent, they seem more concerned about critics from the right than what more progressive institutions are doing.

My best guess at the moment is that it will require a faculty-driven response. I suggested on Kristin’s post that we needed something like a Christian university AAUP. Don’t know how that would work, but I plan to give it a lot more thought as I have the opportunity to visit campuses once my book is out.